Vpn businesses are constantly advertising Vpn's in my country through TV adds, as in using VPN's you can 100% browse websites without anyone knowing who you are.

But poker sites and sports bookmaker sites are constantly banning users who use VPN's through the tools they have.


So which one is it, do VPN's hide the users identity or no? seems not from what I have read and from how easily poker sites ban users using them.

Not exactly true, the VPN will always know your true ip address because you have to connect to the VPN first in order to connect to the internet. When you connect to a VPN service, the VPN is essentially acting as your ISP.

VPNs do hipe your native ip address from websites you visit. However, my understanding is that there are ways to determine whether or not someone is connecting to the website from a VPN or from a native ip address.

I think it's reasonale for poker sites to ban VPNs, they're trying to prevent collusion. If VPNs are allowed, you could sit in the same room with someone, each connect to the poker site from different ip addresses, then sit down at the same table without the site knowing you're connecting from the same actual ip address. There's still plenty of ways to collude, but the poker sites want to at least not make it so easy.

VPN is used mostly for accessing the sites being blocked by ISP. And the speed is much lower.

P.S VPN is not hiding user identity.

I haven't noticed any significant loss of speed while using a VPN. If you're using a free VPN then yes you will almost certainly be getting a slow connection, plus the VPN service will be making up the costs of offering a free VPN by logging all your traffic and using it for ads.

Or by acting as an exit node for paid subscribers and having your bandwidth resold (see "Hola").

I am using Node VPN now.

No, they don't.

They change your IP address that is visible to the outside world.

In addition, they will (normally) encrypt the data between your device and their servers, which might offer some trivial amount of value as well. Since (almost) all legit internet services now encrypt their data, this isn't of much value in most circumstances to most people.
I don't know of any poker site that bans people for using VPNs.

I used to manage PokerStars' location detection team, and it seems stupid to me to ban people for using VPNs. They're not an effective tool for defrauding a modern online poker security system, and they have legitimate uses.